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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

EWTN: A Sad Tale

That's essentially the headline from EWTN's daughter publication, the National Catholic Register. A priest who was fired from his job at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is pissed off, so he is demanding the Church fix his crisis of faith.

Why is EWTN running anti-papal crap hit pieces like this?

Sadly, the answer is very simple: at this point, EWTN and its purchased daughter publication, NCR, have been captured by badly catechized older American Catholics.

American Catholics have always been about ten inches from full-blown Protestantism. Remember, it was the bishop of Little Rock, Arkansas who led the charge AGAINST the declaration of papal infallibility at Vatican I. It was the American Catholic presbyterate and episcopate who endorsed the American heresy of the separation of church and state. In fact, the very heresy of Americanism is named after this country, the first heresy named after a specific geographic region in centuries.

The United States has never been a reliably Catholic country, and it still is not. Unfortunately, EWTN relies almost entirely on elderly American Catholics for its revenue stream, so it cannot afford to report the news in a way that will alienate it from the wealthy old people who help it make bank each month.

One of the reasons VC II was called was precisely that Catholic catechesis already sucked rocks in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The council was called because the state of the world's catechesis had almost uniformly descended to the wasteland that American catechesis had always inhabited.

The pre-VC II catechesis in America was, in fact, so bad, that the minute the 1960s American MSM began reporting that VC II heralded a "change" in Church teachings, most American Catholic laity, and quite a few of the religious and the priests, bought the MSM's reporting hook, line and sinker. If we had been well-catechized, the conciliar teachings could never have been successfully twisted, the majority of American Catholics would never have been taken in by the nutcase "theologians." If adult Catholics had known their faith, they would have known the teachings of the Faith do not change. The very fact that nearly every American adult did buy into the post-VC II heresies is itself proof that the previous thirty years of pre-conciliar catechesis had miserably failed.

So, it is now 2017, forty-five years after the council. EWTN's audience is primarily elderly retired folk who grew up in the pre- and post-conciliar wasteland. Since this is the SAME audience that was never properly catechized to begin with, either before or after the council, and since EWTN has to keep these para-Protestants happy in order to keep its revenue stream, EWTN's reporting skews more and more weird. The organization has been captured by the people who pay it - badly catechized American Catholics.

Whatever EWTN may have been in the past, it isn't that thing anymore.

To be fair, this is pretty much true of all the Catholic media in the United States. It's all about click-bait now, and the best way to get clicks is to appeal to the Protestant American undercurrent in American Catholicism - brand the Pope seven kinds of heretic, and America's Protestant Catholics will richly reward you. Dan Brown's Protestant history of the Catholic Church demonstrated that in spades. EWTN is following in Brown's grand example, and so are all the other "Catholic" outlets that bash the Pope.

But that's Catholic media for you.
It is now indistinguishable from the MSM.

7 comments:

Scenario: A Catholic breaks his vows, divorces his wife and enters into an invalid (or as the Holy Spirit calls it, adulterous) union with another woman. He and the second woman are sexually active and have no intention of separating nor even of refraining from their adulterous sexual relations.

To get to the answer of your dubium, please consider the following. The answer to this dubium may get us to the answer to yours --

Scenario: A Catholic breaks his vows, divorces his wife and enters into an invalid (or as the Holy Spirit calls it, adulterous) union with another woman. But he wishes to have his marriage declared null so he can undergo an ostensibly valid and licit marriage with his paramour. The Church considers his case and finds that he was validly married and therefore may not remarry as long as his true spouse is still alive. But he continues to believe in good faith that his marriage was invalid, and rejects the ruling of the Church.

You don't? Then why are you so upset that EWTN has reported on Msgr. Bux's alarm over the danger to the integrity of the Faith and the unity of the Church caused by the opinion of the pope and many bishops, priests, religious, and laity, that sometimes, contrary to what Jesus and the Apostles and the Catholic Church say, unrepentant adulterers may receive Holy Communion?

By the way, what evidence do you have that Msgr. Bux was fired for incompetence? If you've got evidence, you should produce it. If not, you are morally obliged to retract your claim and express contrition for uttering it.

Steve,Just wanted to relay an incident I had with EWTN. A couple of years ago my wife ordered some stuffed toys from Leaflet Missal for grandchildren. When they arrived I noticed they were made in China. I subsequently checked EWTN's Religious Catalog and noticed similar items for sale there. I wrote the CEO of EWTN expressing my concern that a Catholic Organization would sell items made in China, given the country's history of civil rights violations, i.e. forced abortions. I then asked a simple yes or no question. Does EWTN sell items imported from China? I could not get a straight yes or no answer. All I got was a reply acknowledging EWTN's awareness of China's history.

EWTN has, in the past, banned a calendar because the Raphael painting showed baby Jesus' penis. But they are fine pushing Chinese goods, originating in slave labor and an abortion culture. That sounds EXACTLY like the EWTN we all know and love!